Upon reaching Nacogdoches, Long’s forces occupied the Old Stone Fort, organized a provisional government, and issued a proclamation declaring Texas a free and independent republic, and another newspaper—the third in Nacogdoches as well as in Texas—was published by Horatio Bigelow. It was called “The Mexican Advocate.”
It is very probable that Dr. Long’s expedition would have been completely successful if it had been organized a year later, after the revolutionary movement had begun in Spain but in 1819 the royalists were in control in Mexico; and that fact, together with Long’s division of his forces after leaving Nacogdoches for the West, so weakened his fighting units as to cause them to fall an easy prey to the successive onslaughts of the Spanish Army sent against him under Colonel Perez.
With the capture of his block houses and forts on the Brazos, Trinity and Red rivers, Mrs. Jane Long, who had been left at Nacogdoches, fled across the Sabine, and her husband soon followed, thus ending his first attempt at freeing Texas, in October, 1819.
Frost Thorne Home—Hart Hotel
Residence of Texas’ first millionaire. Built 1825. See [page 12].
Nacogdoches—The Mexican Town
Under the leadership of Alcalde James Dill Nacogdoches soon regained its former prestige as the largest town in East Texas, and settlers from the United States began coming in increasing numbers under the beneficient colonization laws of the new government in Mexico; but things were much changed. In 1825 Haden and Benjamin Edwards secured their ill-fated contract as empresarios. When Edwards began to plant his colonists, sometimes on land which had once belonged to the Mexican inhabitants and had been abandoned temporarily in the flight of 1813, the friction between the Americans and Mexicans increased. On the northwest of them also had settled a tribe of Cherokee Indians, who claimed the right to occupy a vast territory which had formerly been the habitation of the friendly Tejas Indians.
This triangular situation bred distrust and antagonism that at last broke out into open warfare, and threw the country into the wildest disorder, in what is known as the Fredonian War in 1826. The coup of Edwards was at first successful, and he and his followers were able to seize the “Stone House” and fortify it; but the citizenship of Nacogdoches and the surrounding country was not behind the movement, and it was doomed to failure from its inception.
The Fredonian rebellion resulted in many of the prominent citizens of the town being expelled in 1827—among whom were John S. Roberts, Haden and Benjamin Edwards, Adolphus Sterne and Martin Parmer. The Mexican general, Ahumada, who occupied Nacogdoches upon this occasion, was a genuine diplomat, and with the assistance and advice of Stephen F. Austin, who came to Nacogdoches with Ahumada, soon had the old town peaceful again. However, the man whom Ahumada selected as comandante here proved to be an unfortunate choice, and Colonel Jose de las Piedras soon aroused the hostility of the American settlers with his high-handed, arbitrary methods, as was the case with Col. Bradburn at Anahuac.
